January 2012

Happy Holidays!

(click to see more pictures of the 2011 Holiday Lights)

• Annual Meeting Set for January 10, 2012... Please Come! The Annual Meeting of the Barrington Heights Association of Homeowners will start at 7:00 pm (sign-in at 6:30 pm) at the West Linn Adult Community Center. All homeowners are encouraged to come. The primary agenda item is the election of the Board of Directors. The vote will require a quorum of 25% (i.e. 65 lots represented). Regardless of the quorum, this will be a chance to ask questions of and provide input to the Board. There will also be a brief presentation on the state of Barrington Heights.

• Sidewalk on Barrington Drive near Salamo Entrance. The sidewalk was installed on the vacant lot at the entrance to improve pedestrian safety. Work has begun on the planting strip and landscaping in the area to improve the look of the main entrance to the neighborhood.

• Sidewalk Repair Project. Over a year ago, the Board and City of West Linn employees walked the neighborhood to assess the state of our sidewalks and found over 100 locations where they are cracked or displaced (mostly due to street trees). While repairing the sidewalks is the responsibility of the respective homeowners, any work in the right-of-way (which includes the sidewalk and planting strip) requires a public works permit. To help homeowners address these issues, a committee was formed under Peter Muhlbach and Brad Arms to coordinate a neighborhood sidewalk project. A vendor was engaged, with separate bids for each interested homeowner, permits were coordinated, and the City agreed to waive permit fees. Three homeowners participated in November and two more are planning work in December. So far, all homeowners are satisfied with the work completed. In the future, we plan to let individual homeowners deal with sidewalk issues directly ...but will be glad to provide how-to information to those interested (see sidebar “Cracked Sidewalks” under Hot Topics on this page).

• Mailbox for Phase 11. A new mailbox is going in on lower Beacon Hill to handle the additional houses being built in Phase 11. Following the general practice in the past, the cost of this mailbox is being assessed to Phase 11 owners.

• 2012 Assessments. Assessment billings for 2012 go out at the beginning of December. They are due on January 1, 2012. If not received by February 1, 2012, late fees and interest begin to accrue. If payment cannot be made by the due date, please contact Stacy Bloos to make payment arrangements and minimize additional collection charges.

• 2012 Budget Adopted: The Board approved the 2012 Budget (see Documents page). Annual assessments will remain at $500 for the 4th year in a row. Radcliffe Court residents will pay an additional assessment of $286.

• Le Chevalier Annexation Halted: The Le Chevalier HOA (representing the neighborhood behind the gates & horses on Beacon Hill Drive) had expressed an interest in becoming a part of Barrington Heights. Subsequent legal work by Le Chevalier indicated that this process would be more costly and cumbersome than originally anticipated because there is no simple way to merge or annex two homeowner associations. Hence, no further work is planned on this project.

• Parking: According to our rules and regulations, parking is only allowed on the streets in Barrington Heights for short periods by guests. Overnight parking, repeated daily parking or parking for extended periods is not allowed. The reasons for this rule are: safety (i.e. visibility of children and on-coming cars is hampered by parked cars) and property values (an excessive number of parked cars hurts the aesthetics of the neighborhood). In April, the Board directed the community manager to begin citing homeowners when the same car was seen to be parked on the street on multiple occasions. While this process is not ideal, it is the only practical method we have found to address the issue. If you received a compliance letter for a car that did not belong to you or your guest, we apologize. Please let our community manager, Stacy Bloos, know.